


Interlude with a Dead Man

by JoeMcJoe



Series: Occult Investigations Agency [3]
Category: Mutants & Masterminds (Roleplaying Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:07:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24253327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoeMcJoe/pseuds/JoeMcJoe
Summary: LaCroix and Markur are asked to investigate a patient who has died but not passed on.
Series: Occult Investigations Agency [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1182911





	Interlude with a Dead Man

“Mr. Fazakas _says_ he's fine,” the nurse explained. “Except he only inhales to talk. Otherwise no respiration, no heartbeat, no blood flow, nothing.”

“That’s not normal,” said the hospital administrator, Mr. Cavanaugh.

Seth Markur stood motionless. Dr. Gideon LaCroix nodded.

Cavanaugh said hesitantly, “This section has just been rebuilt.”

“Pretty,” said Markur, deadpan. “And?”

“You'll keep things quiet right? This is a recuperative section. They need their sleep.”

“We'll see him,” said Dr. Gideon LaCroix. 

“Just...be careful,” said the administrator, wringing his hands. “When supers get involved, costs go up.”

“The room is semiprivate but we've moved Mr. Gavell out,” said the nurse. “Pending.”

LaCroix made a hand motion to shoo them away. Once they had gone, Markur murmured, “Vampire?”

“Maybe. Restless dead, perhaps. Draugr.” LaCroix smiled. “Or maybe it's a demon.”

“I wish. They're easy if you know the name,” Markur replied. “I don't smell a demon, though.” 

LaCroix pushed open the door with his fetch stick. “Hello, Mr. Fazakas. How are you doing?" Markur followed, with his penknife in hand.

“Pain-free! Stiffening up a bit, though.” Mr. Fazakas was in his sixties, curly salt-and-pepper hair around the rim of his bald head. He was sitting in bed, the sheet gathered around his apple belly. “Tell you the truth, I haven't been pain-free since a building foundation fell on me in 82. Hurt my knees. I feel this good, I might go back to work. You're doctors?”

“ _He's_ the doctor,” said Markur, standing back.

“I'm what’s known as a traditional practitioner,” said LaCroix. “Would you mind lying back for me and just relaxing?”

“Oh, you can't do that in the middle of a workday. You relax and you might not get up, heh-heh-heh.”

“So true, Mr. Fazakas. Just hold still for a moment.” LaCroix spoke silently to the spirits. Aloud he said, “What do you remember?” 

“Call me Constantin,” said Mr. Fazakas. “They came to wake me for my sleeping pill, but I was already awake. I haven't felt sleepy since.”

“What holds you here?”

Fazakas snorted. “Nothing. My wife passed on, my son died in an accident, my daughter married a Catholic and then moved out West and decided she was a lesbian. No grandchildren. I'd die if I could.” 

“But you stayed with your body.”

“Of course I stayed. I’m waiting for the doctors. You guys. Even though one of you is...you know. Now, though, I feel so good I might go back to work. They'll be surprised to see me at the shop.”

“You didn't see a light? Or hear your wife?”

“Nope.”

LaCroix turned to Markur. “No light. No agent, no psychopomp. Look at his feet.”

“He’s starting to show lividity. Even here he smells like a dead person. But usually spirits find their own ways to the afterlife.” Markur looked around the room as if the answer were there. 

“All dead people? Someone blocked off the Sunless Realms?”

“We’d hear the commotion. It’s just him.”

“I can give him a fast trip.”

Markur shrugged. “Do it then.”

“Just lie back, Mr. Fazakas. I'm going to help you along.” LaCroix opened his pouch and poured corn meal along the floor, spelling out mystic sigils and the names of spirits. Markur shut the doors to the washroom and hall as LaCroix took off his suit jacket. Then LaCroix started singing. 

It was hard work, and Fazakas’ spirit did something odd: instead of protesting or singing along, Fazakas’ body or spirit said nonsense syllables. LaCroix could not make sense of them and ignored them.

Finally, after fifteen minutes, LaCroix stopped and said, “It's done.” He mopped sweat from his brow. “He's passed on.”

The corpse talked. “I'm still here,” moaned Mr. Fazakas, “but I can't move.” Markur’s nose twitched.

“What—?” LaCroix went to bend over the dead man, and Markur knocked him aside.

“You smell it? Demon!”

Fazakas' arms closed on empty space, missing LaCroix by inches. 

“ _He_ knows me,” growled the thing now wearing Fazakas' body. “But not by name.” 

“I know you well enough,” said Markur, and with a flick of his wrist his penknife extended to a full sword, and he gripped it with two hands. “You were hiding inside Fazakas.”

“Just say my name and make me go away, then.” The thing grinned, showing sharp fangs and shredded the bed sheets with fingers turned into claws. “Now your friend has opened the doorway and more can come.”

“He’s got fangs? Vampire?” asked LaCroix, scrambling back on the floor as Markur kept himself between the two. Markur spared a glance for LaCroix. “My knowledge has only recently become practical.”

“Akazizel!” coughed the monster. 

“What'd he say?”

Markur did not admit it was the name of his sword. “A name. Not the name of the Vampire King.” Markur moved warily, trying to keep himself between LaCroix and the monster. 

“Akazizel, you will roast in the lowest pits! Your escape will not save you.”

“You have a name I don't know about?” asked LaCroix.

“Lots. I was trapped in Hell for centuries.” Markur slashed once, and the monster flipped up the hospital bed to stop him. Floor tiles cracked. “Exorcism might work, but best to learn his name.”

LaCroix spotted a crucifix on the table beside the other bed and grabbed it. He thrust it toward the monster, which hissed in response. 

Markur leapt over the bed. The monster grabbed the IV stand and parried as they exchanged staccato blows. 

LaCroix held his fetch stick high. “Your body is mine to command. The bodies of all the dead are mine.” He stared at the body of Mr. Fazakas and focused his will—

The demon laughed. “ _You_ cannot banish me. This body is mine, now, and I shape it to my needs.” It was barely recognizable as Fazakas now, lean and hungry, with long nails—claws—like swords, and teeth like scythe blades. It picked up a bedside table and threw it at LaCroix. Glass shattered and dropped musically to the floor. LaCroix was already somewhere else, his crucifix held forward as a shield. 

While it was distracted, Markur cut the demon's hand off; the demon roared, and the hand began to crawl along the floor, claws scritching on the tile. 

“Bind it!” shouted LaCroix. 

“I can't, you wrecked the circle!” Markur slashed the hand in two, and each half began to move. Markur's nostrils twitched: each separated body part had become a vessel for a demon. “Three demons! Or more! It is a gateway!” He raised the sword high for a broad sweep, but LaCroix could not see at what.

“Cover me!”

LaCroix brought the crucifix down on the demon’s shoulder to spoil its aim as it swung at Markur. Sulfurous smoke erupted, combining the worst of rotten eggs, bad meat, and vomit.

The demon roared again, and then: “I'll stitch your arm to mine for that, and use it to disembowel you!”

LaCroix leapt over the other bed and tumbled to the floor there. Markur cleaved a great hole in the floor; steam and other gases spurted up, obscuring Markur in a cloud of greenish smoke.

The demon was too angry at LaCroix to notice. He tossed the big hospital bed aside, to the window. The thick metal tubing of the bed frame crumpled like straws, but the window held. 

Markur slashed the floor again, and this time water began to well up. LaCroix pulled the curtain between the beds, granting him a half-second to scramble out of sight. There were screams from outside.

The demon tore through the curtain and caught LaCroix in one rawhide hand, carried him out the door into the hallway.

In the hallway were screams. Two men and a woman shambled up, naked but for toe tags and evidence of violent deaths. 

“Zombies?” cried Markur. 

“Mine! _I_ can’t touch him,” said LaCroix. Two zombies wrestled with the demon, freeing LaCroix, who dropped to the floor.

The other zombie headed into the room. Markur said, “More demons can possess them, until I've finished destroying the gateway!”

The zombie shuddered as a demon possessed it. "Too late," it growled.

In the space between words, LaCroix said, “You never told me—”

Grinning, the original demon pushed one of the zombies into the room as Markur made a last cut at the ceiling. The corpse knocked him over and knocked his sword from his hand. Acrid smoke began to billow from the roof.

“Akazizel!” cried the newest demon even as its skin sloughed off, and sprang after the sword. Without his sword—his demon, his partner Akazizel—Markur was a normal man.

Markur couldn't see his sword for the acrid smoke filling the room, but he could see the newest demon scrambling for it, and he dove on the demon.

“Akazizel! Know that Zekabelial sent you to your vengeance—”

Markur spoke quickly, an ancient incantation of banishment, naming Zekabelial specifically, and the writhing skinless thing beneath him stopped moving.

The vapors burned his chest and his skin. The vapors—he needed Akazizel’s help. He could see his sword under a chair by the wall. He crawled toward it.

In the hall, the demon realized what was happening. “Akazizelllll!” it screamed and _carried_ the last zombie with it into the room.

Markur reached for his sword—

—and the demon sank his claw into Markur's back, impaling him to the floor.

The demon chuckled like old oil draining from a car. “Akazizel is mine, now.” The demon reach for the sword—

—and couldn’t get there.

It was stuck by the same claw, deep in the floor.

“You'll have to wait...for me...to die,” gasped Markur.

“I'll wait. I have all the time in this world,” said the demon. “And beyond.”

“I don't think so,” said LaCroix. He poured corn meal in a circle around the demon and Markur.

“What are you doing?” the demon struggled. The remaining zombie dropped the two wriggling half-hands into the circle.

“Banishing you.”

“What? Stop!”

The zombie began to bang rhythmically on a bedpan.

“When I opened the portal the first time, Fazakas’ body told me things. It told me your name.” LaCroix sang the incantation of banishment while the demon struggled, opening wider holes in Markur's body, while he winced and groaned.

LaCroix banged his stick on the ground. “Be gone.” 

The demon was gone. The claw was gone. The zombies fell to the ground, lifeless corpses. 

“Here,” said LaCroix. “This is yours.” He batted the sword to Markur, and fell to the floor. 

Markur lay there amidst the wreckage, feeling his body grow whole again. 

“How did we get this job?” asked LaCroix. 

From his position on the floor, Markur said, “Campbell promised them less collateral damage than if superheroes handled it.” 

Lying in the rubble beside him, LaCroix laughed and laughed. 


End file.
